Recently completed Acquia Backend Specialist Certification thought to share my thoughts around this certification exam that might help the aspiring ones. While preparing for this exam, I had heard that this is the toughest exam out of all the Acquia Drupal Certifications and in my opinion, this rumour is true.
Actually, these certifications might be easy for others but were not for me, as, since last 1.5 yrs I have been working in Drupal 7 only. When I started preparing for this exam, I followed the same preparation pattern which I used while preparing for Acquia Drupal 8 Developer Certification Exam.
Drupalize.me offers extensive study material for Acquia Certification Exam Preparation and that really helped me a lot for cracking D8 Developer Certification 3 months back. Questions were very straightforward, but from a larger scope and fortunately covered by Drupalize.me Certification guide. But this time this was not enough, merely bookish knowledge is not enough for Drupal 8 Backend Specialist Certification. Contrast to the Developer Exam, this time most of the questions were based on hands-on experience.
Let me try to cover my experience domain wise and see if that helps:
Fundamental web development concepts:
- CSS Selectors
- HTML5 Features
- Git advanced commands like squash, bisect and rebase
- Composer update, remove, install, require commands
Drupal core API:
- Routing file, Controllers, Arguments, Permissions
- Entity API (Content Entity Type and Config Entity Type), Annotations, different handlers available for Entity/Plugin.
- Defining new entity, plugin (Block, FieldType, FieldWidget, FieldFormatter).
- Form API, Alters handling user input, displaying them.
Debug code, troubleshooting and Security:
- Drupal Core and Contrib Security Modules
- How to debug server errors and how to handle them?
- Denial of Service Attack and Trusted host settings (https://www.drupal.org/node/1992030)
- Configuring Environment for Theme Development: (https://drupalize.me/tutorial/configure-your-environment-theme-development?p=2512)
Theme Integration and Performance:
- Twig templates, syntax, printing variables
- Render API, Cache API especially cache invalidating, cache bubble
- Javascript API
Leveraging community:
- Coding standards: Doc comment, function parameter comments, return comments
- Reporting issue to a Drupal module and security issue reporting
- Creating and Applying Patch
You may find this very similar to https://www.acquia.com/customer-success/learning-services/acquia-certification-program and the actual reality is the exam strictly follow these guidelines.
Disclaimer: Kindly just not rely on these guidelines for the certification exam. The original exam may be completely different. :D
Jokes apart ALL THE BEST for your exam.
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